


Fragrance of terebinth

by Lilliburlero



Series: Consistently Homesick [9]
Category: King Rat - James Clavell, The Magus - John Fowles, The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: 1950s, Foley Effects, Gen, Greece, Literary References & Allusions, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stealth Crossover, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-18 21:32:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7331347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robert Anquetil finds a (slightly) less choppy anchorage in reckless adventure and experimental archaeology.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fragrance of terebinth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AJHall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/gifts).



> This fic is a prequel to ['Happier than before'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2690090/chapters/6019121) and a sequel to ['Voluble Discourse'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2325596).
> 
> It's #2 in a series of fics inspired by lines of poetry obtained using a sort-of _sortes Virgilianae_ method. AJHall drew the line 'the world of time and earth. Fragrance of terebinth' from Giorgos Seferis' poem 'Enkomi', and rashly asked for the Marlows, and a crossover.

It hadn’t even been one of their more momentous quarrels. Nothing like the one over the modifications to their itinerary necessitated by postwar political realities (Robert’s victory), the one about the feasibility of rowing a replica of a twenty-oar Bronze Age galley up the Bosphorus (Peter’s), or the trials and training that would be required to get the crew into condition to do it (Robert’s again). All that had happened was that Peter’s unease at the shipwright’s cheerful habit of rolling the half-built galley from side to side, apparently as the fancy took him to work where he pleased, had exploded into demonstrative expression.

Frances came sprinting up the path to the villa. ‘I’ve come to fetch my camera,’ she panted. ‘Come and see what old Vasilis has done now.’ 

Robert followed her down to the stretch of foreshore beside Vasilis’ workshed. The galley lay canted on the ground. The shipwright, greasy felt hat pulled down over his brow, was blinking with a deceptive mildness up at Peter Marlowe, whose rangy frame quivered with the effort of refraining from gesticulation as he rained vituperation, in jumbled English, Greek and Malay, on Vasilis’ ancestors and descendants unto the fourth generation. A young Englishman named d’Urfe, who had recently taken to hanging about the boatyard to relieve the brutishness and tedium of classroom and Common Room at the Lord Byron School, lounged insolently against the clinkered wall of the shed. 

Robert mustered a crisp quarterdeck voice and said in Greek, ‘What’s happening? Why is the boat off the blocks?’ 

Vasilis folded his arms and glowered. Frances, with a cat-footed tact useful in both her professions, crept around the hull to set up a shot. Peter wheeled around. 

‘This fucker,’ he spat in English, ‘decided he’d done enough planking on the starboard side, shouted Geronimo and pulled out the props, leaving me and Minas to deal with it.’ Vasilis’ assistant, needing no English to understand this speech, confirmed it with a rueful grin. 

Robert blinked away the image of the planks cracking on impact, a man crushed beneath the falling hull. Vasilis, feeling his artisanal integrity impugned, made an inscrutable, contained gesture with his right hand and stared out to sea. 

‘Well, look, Peter. No harm done, and Vasilis knows his business better than you do, for Christ’s sake. His expertise is what we came—’ Robert thought _to this creepy, silent, pine-haunted, cistern-water island with barely a wild beast or a bird alive on it_ and said firmly, pragmatically, ‘—here for.’ 

‘I’m bloody sick of catering to the old bugger’s whims, Robbie. What if he loses interest, or gets laid up? We're weeks behind schedule—’ 

‘Shut up, Peter.’ Holding up his hand, Robert spoke with the distracted air of command which enforces at least momentary compliance in the most refractory subject. He frowned and looked at his feet, groping for a diplomatic phrase in the island dialect that might excuse his volatile countryman sufficiently to effect détente. He hit upon it quite quickly, but in raising his eyes met d'Urfe's gaze, a lazy squint in a lean, charming face. The schoolmaster's lips curved in an intimate half-smile, as if they had already shared a private joke. Forgetting any idea of conciliation, Robert capitulated without thought to a primitive, exhibitionistic impulse. 

‘The skipper out-Marlowes Marlowe,’ he remarked lightly. ‘Pray you avoid it.’ 

Peter's face turned grey; its handsome structure stood keenly outlined under skin prematurely aged. The effect was hideous, a living _transi_ effigy. Frances, though invisible, snorted unmistakably. Believing himself a witness to the most mortal of insults in the English lexicon, Minas wriggled his limbs in the expectation of having to forestall violence. Vasilis lifted his chin, tutted like a haggler who has reached the stage of a bargain wherein the vendor’s every syllable is an affront, and stalked off into his shed. 

A stinging report resounded in the clear, sea-rinsed air. It died oddly, abruptly: like many places on the island, Vasilis’s workspace had its own uncanny pocket acoustics. All Robert knew for a moment was that it was not gunfire; he thought hysterically that the planking had under some mysterious pressure just now given way. The sound came again, and he realised that it was d'Urfe, clapping slowly. ‘Full marks,’ he drawled. ‘Full marks, Anquetil.’ 

Robert stepped forward, dimly aware of a presence moving the other way, with whom he brushed shoulders. He said, ‘You seem to have confused me with one of your pupils, d'Urfe. Just remember I’m not and we should get along rather nicely.’ The need to keep his voice level produced native but unforeseen vowels and rhoticity; he flinched inwardly, but the Devonian seemed to have reinforced his unspoken _forget your manners again, and I'll wring your worthless neck_ : d’Urfe simply returned a smile of implacably courteous dislike as he strolled away. 

Turning back, Robert recognised, to his shame, that he had allowed a muddle of personal honour and mental association to obstruct his duty of care. Peter stood rooted and staring, clutching his left elbow; the forearm and hand jerked wildly beneath, as if essential nervous connection had been severed. Frances, standing in front of him at a carefully-judged arm’s length, was speaking about the photographs she had just taken, describing their surroundings in a low, even voice, a voice that betokened _something understood_. At the time, Robert struggled to identify exactly how he felt about it, coming upon the analogy with a grunt of private laughter a few days later: undeniably caught, he had, with stubborn _esprit de corps_ , merely been waiting for the umpire’s finger to go up. 

Peter groaned, an unearthly creaking mutter. _Smerdaleon de limēn Pagasēios ēde kai autē / Pēlias iakhen Argō episperkhousa neesthai_ , Robert thought, shivering. Peter’s arms fell to his sides and his shoulders drooped; with an ungainly twist at the waist he swung around and fled, scrambling, for the hills. Minas gave an embarrassed, disowning shrug at what he clearly regarded as unseemly national temperament and shuffled into the shed to enjoy the phlegmatic company of his own people. 

Robert started helplessly, too late, to follow Peter up the path. ‘Let him go,’ Frances said gently, catching his arm. ‘We’ve—an agreement, quite a long-standing one, for when it happens. You probably should too.’ 

‘Yes. Yes, we bloody well should. Look, I’m most awfully sorry. _L’esprit de l’escalier_ , but going up, if you get me.’ 

‘Don’t be. It was spot on. And funny. Peter needs reminding that for a man who loathes play-acting so much he won't even go to the pictures, he can be pretty melodramatic. D’Urfe's a little shit, isn't he? I suppose he wasn't to know.’ 

‘ _I_ didn’t know. I mean, in a general sense I did, but not the specifics. Unexpected loud, sharp noises, of course. I don't always entirely relish them myself. But I wonder when he'd have got around to telling me. Doesn’t he ever take any damn responsibility?’ 

‘He’s fine when he hasn’t to admit to a weakness.’ 

‘But that’s exactly when one must own up. That's nursery-level stuff.’ 

‘I know. Every inch the fly-boy, and I don't mean it flatteringly. Ralph was right about you, anyway. Come on. Let’s try and placate Vasilis first.’ 

Peter had not gone very far. After a couple of hours of searching, Frances and Robert found him on the hills above the grim, penal blocks of the school, up a gulley, over a small saddle. He had managed, in this land of pine, to locate an ill-advised and abandoned attempt at cultivation, olive and oleaster, _ho men phyliēs, ho d'elaiēs_ , and lay lithely and impossibly curled in a bed of leaves, his head between his knees and his stomach under his left ear, fast asleep. Robert, a fisherman before he was anything else, decided very deliberately, there and then, to read it as a _good_ omen. 

‘You’d better wake him, Fran. He’ll take it better from you.’ 

‘No,’ she said, ‘ _you_.’ 

The next morning, spring had come, the rapid, riotous Greek spring. Asphodels, orchids, anemones, grape hyacinths and gladioli burst from the earth, the forest soughed soft and resinous, and the air was full of prophetic birds.

**Author's Note:**

> The shipwright's apparently incautious behaviour is a direct lift, like much else here, from Tim Severin's book _The Jason Voyage_ , in which he describes his re-enactment of the journey of the Argonauts. Severin's galley was built on the island of Spetses, for which I have drawn heavily on John Fowles' novel _The Magus_ , set on a fictionalised version of the island in the early 1950s (when this fic is also set), to the point of borrowing Fowles' unsympathetic protagonist Nicholas d'Urfe.
> 
> 'The skipper out-Marlowes Marlowe': cf. _Hamlet_ , III, ii.
> 
> 'Smerdaleon de limēn Pagasēios ēde kai autē/Pēlias iakhen Argō episperkhousa neesthai': _Argonautica_ 1.522-3. 'And a strange cry did the harbour of Pagasae utter, yea, and Pelian Argo herself' (trans. R.C. Seaton).
> 
> 'ho men phyliēs, ho d'elaiēs': _Odyssey_ 5.477. Washed up on the shore of Nausikaa's island, Odysseus shelters in a bed of leaves under an oleaster and a cultivated olive tree that have twisted together.


End file.
